After George Clooney agreed to top-line Jay Kelly, he learned that director Noah Baumbach prefers his actors to shoot a lot of takes. Clooney was already all in on the project; he’d said yes less than 24 hours after receiving the screenplay. But the star felt less than thrilled about that element. “I literally said to him, ‘Noah, look, I love the script. I love you as a director, but I’m 63 years old, dude—I can’t do 50 takes,’” Clooney tells me. “‘I don’t have it in me. I’ve got the acting range from A to B.’”
Clooney’s points are core to Jay Kelly’s delicious metatext. The film, cowritten by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer in her feature-film scripting debut, stars Clooney as a gigantic movie star in his 60s facing down a personal reckoning. His career has been characterized by consistent success, at times overwhelming fame, and the occasional criticism that he mostly plays himself onscreen. I’m talking about Jay, not George.
Clooney’s eponymous character is fictional, certainly—but these overlapping, memoiristic layers make the film particularly rich. Are we observing how one of the most iconic stars of his era navigates his day to day, or just getting the funhouse-mirror version? Is that Clooney crying near the movie’s end, or Jay?
Either way, Clooney pushes toward serious emotional honesty, doing the most vulnerable work of his career. “The very fact that he wanted to do it gave you all the information you needed about whether or not he was going to let himself go there,” Mortimer says. “It’s risky to put yourself out there like that—and he doesn’t have to be taking risks like that anymore.” But the Oscar-winning Clooney saw Jay Kelly in simpler terms. “When you’re an actor in my position, at my age, finding roles like this aren’t all that common,” he says. “If you can’t make peace with aging, then you’ve got to get out of the business and just disappear. I’m now the guy that, when I go running after a bad guy, it’s funny—it’s not suspenseful. That’s okay. I embrace all of that.”
Jay Kelly began as an exercise for Baumbach, an attempt to fall in love with the movies again. The Oscar nominee (The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) had just directed White Noise, his most expensive movie to date, and one that failed to click with audiences and critics. (When I describe the reaction as “divisive,” Baumbach quips, “That’s a nice way to put it.”) The experience took a lot out of him. “That was a really hard time for me. I’m very proud of that movie, but I had a really hard time making it,” he says. “I had this feeling of, like, ‘Am I doing this just because I always wanted to do it—do I even like doing it anymore?’” The period led to a “quiet crisis,” as Baumbach began to doubt the profession to which he’d dedicated his life.
Two key developments brought him back. One was cowriting Barbie with his wife, Greta Gerwig, and watching her direct that eventual cultural phenomenon. The other was getting to know Mortimer, who chaperoned her children, actors Sam and May Nivola, on the set of White Noise. She and her husband, Alessandro Nivola, grew close with Baumbach and Gerwig during production. “It was this kind of reverse nepotism, I guess, where my kids got me this ‘in’ with Noah and I ended up hanging out with them a lot,” Mortimer says with a laugh.
A darling of indie cinema, Mortimer had recently pivoted to writing her own TV shows, like HBO’s small gem Doll & Em. Over dinner at her house one evening, she asked Baumbach what he was working on; by the end of that meal, he’d found a new collaborator. “I don’t quite know why I asked her to write it with me,” Baumbach says. “But I liked myself with her. I liked how I felt inspired. She brought so much of herself to this, but I also felt that I was funnier and more charming and more profound than I might be without her.” The project would be inspired by their own experiences in the industry—and eventually, those of Clooney and a stacked ensemble—while being rooted in the director’s deeply personal expression.
Peppering their script with subtle homage, Baumbach and Mortimer talked through everything from the psychological thrills of Hitchcock to the screwball odyssey of Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels. The virtuosic opening sequence, waltzing through a movie set, hints at Baumbach’s fresh ambitions behind the camera and the affection fueling them: a love for the dizzying chaos of filmmaking. It’s riddled with references and hard to track, until it suddenly snaps into place—like a bit of movie magic. “It’s about falling back in love with what you do, and falling back in love with yourself,” Baumbach says.
Jay Kelly does not make such a journey easy on our hero. He senses a widening distance between him and his younger daughter (Grace Edwards), while still being haunted by the firmer estrangement from his eldest (Riley Keough). He’s mourning the sudden death of the director who got him his big break (Jim Broadbent). And he tensely reunites with an acting-school buddy who didn’t make it (Billy Crudup, in a bravura single-scene turn), leading to a brutal reality check on the complex personal choices that lead to megafame and, maybe, megaloneliness.
All of this swirls while Jay grudgingly goes to accept a prestigious tribute award from an Italian film festival—giving him the chance to chase his kid through Europe and, hopefully, bring together his loved ones for a career-capping celebration. The trek to the event sparks flashbacks, which Baumbach and Oscar-winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land) shot on practical sets to fuse reality and memory. You’ll watch Clooney go from the promise of the present to the pain of the past in a single take.
“Movie stars are our avatars. They are people that we invest in and project onto and live through,” Baumbach says. “And a movie star needed to play the movie star. That was in the DNA of what this thing should be: What if a movie star was essentially playing one, and reflecting back our own vulnerabilities and our own questions about life? What would that mean? I don’t know that I knew exactly, but it seemed interesting.”
“It’s all the things that Noah has loved his whole life and have meant so much to him,” Mortimer adds. “He can embody that character in a way, I do think. And once he started to do that, then I could join in.”
Jay Kelly is fundamentally a road movie. Characters bop in and out of Jay’s life, including his publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), who gets him on his way, and his imposing father (Stacy Keach), who meets him at the festival in Tuscany. Jay’s one constant is his devoted and tireless manager, Ron (Adam Sandler). They are inseparable, mostly because Jay needs Ron never to go far. So, while Ron has his own personal life—a wife (Gerwig) and kids—he boards the train with Jay anyway. As they traverse the Italian countryside, their relationship—personal and professional—is tested to its limit.
Clooney had told Baumbach nearly 20 years ago he hoped to work with him one day, and Baumbach never forgot it. But Baumbach went into Jay Kelly after directing Sandler to a moving dramatic turn in The Meyerowitz Stories, and becoming good friends with him. “He just kind of said, yeah, he’s writing our next thing,” Sandler tells me. “He didn’t even tell me what it’s about.” Once Sandler got the plot, the sell was clear: “My character loves George’s character so much, and I thought that would be fun to do and easy to do with George. And as a guy who’s an actor who’d live a similar life to Jay Kelly, it’s a crazy depiction—how accurate a lot of it is.”
Sandler serves as Jay Kelly’s wheeling-and-dealing heartbeat. “Some of these scenes were so heavy that I would say, ‘I’ve got to sit and concentrate. I can’t pick up the phone for a little bit,’” Sandler says. “And when you do that, your family is definitely, like, ‘What’s happening right now?’ It’s an odd feeling. Everyone gets affected.” He shadowed his own team to get a sense of how Ron would operate, and settled on super agent Jeremy Barber as a model for the role. But the part was chiefly informed by his costar, whom Sandler had been casually acquainted with since Clooney hosted Saturday Night Live in the mid ’90s. While making Jay Kelly, they were always together. “He invited my family everywhere, every place in Italy and England,” Sandler says. “Our trailers were next to each other. His friends and my friends all hung out, shot hoops, threw the baseball around, talked about other movies we like, other comedians that have made us laugh, his upbringing, my upbringing.”
Clooney, meanwhile, got protective of Sandler. “This film, more than any film Adam has done, shows what a beautiful, heartfelt, soulful actor he is—I kept telling the cast, ‘Don’t call him Sand Man. Don’t talk to him like he’s just some goofy comedian. He’s actually a really beautiful, wonderful actor,’” he says. “Because of what his paycheck is, which is doing big goofy comedies, when he does these other, beautiful, Uncut Gems kinds of movies, it reminds people of that. He’s not just a good comedian.”
As for Clooney, over the years, critics and observers—most recently, oddly, and to great fanfare, Hunter Biden—have scrutinized his own versatility. “Do people say that I only play myself? I don’t give a shit,” Clooney says flatly. “There aren’t that many guys in my age group that are allowed to do both broad comedies like O Brother [Where Art Thou?] and then do Michael Clayton or Syriana. So if that means I’m playing myself all the time, I don’t give a shit.”
He brings it back to a key quote in Jay Kelly: “Have you ever tried playing yourself? It’s hard to do.”
“I’ve been the beneficiary of having my career not be massively successful in lots of different directions,” Clooney continues. “I didn’t really get successful, in the kind of success that can be blinding, until I was 33 years old. I’d been working for 12 years at that point. I had a real understanding of how fleeting all of it is and how little it has to do with you, quite honestly.”
Clooney’s first answer for my interview began, “It was fun because I always loved Alexander—I’m sorry, I was just talking to Alexander. I always loved Noah.” An innocent mistake, referring to filmmaker Alexander Payne instead of Baumbach—but perhaps a telling one. Clooney got his last acting Oscar nomination nearly 15 years ago, for Payne’s The Descendants—and this new film will surely put him back in the awards conversation. Until our chat, the actor didn’t know that Payne is also presiding over the competition jury for this year’s Venice Film Festival, where Jay Kelly will make its world premiere later this month. “I’d do a movie with that guy any day of the week,” he says with a smile. “I’m not buttering up.”
You can count the movies Clooney has appeared in since 2017 on one hand. And while Baumbach may not have been running dozens of takes with Clooney, the director did find the actor willing—even eager—to sync up with his methods. “George really was, like, ‘I’m here for you to work the way you feel we should work,’” Baumbach says. “Within a scene, you can feel this dashing, debonair movie star—and then you can see an older father, or a son who’s trying to get the approval of his father, or a friend in terms of Ron. He is able to make all these transformations invisibly.”
Clooney is too much of a pro to not make it look easy, and he speaks of making Jay Kelly like a family affair. He’s been friendly with Sandler for decades. He’s had costar Isla Fisher over to his home a bunch. He appeared in his first-ever movie, the misbegotten Grizzly II: Revenge, alongside Laura Dern more than 40 years ago, and she’s been like his “little sister” ever since. Clooney is our assured guide into this tartly funny, carefully nostalgic portrait of Hollywood. He may never have been this comfortable onscreen; he’s maybe never before been pushed to look inward like this.
“Part of being 64 and having been in the business for a long time now—you do get to know people, right?” he says. “What a treat. I got to be along for the ride.”
Jay Kelly will premiere at the Venice Film Festival before it’s released in US theaters on November 14. Netflix will then stream the film beginning December 5. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
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